Reporting health economic evaluations: CHEERS and beyond - Volume 30, Issue

Health economic evaluations are relevant to those making healthcare resource allocation decisions, such as listing a new drug on the national formulary or launching a new vaccination programme. Compared with clinical studies that report only the…

A guide to pre-approval regulatory documents - Volume 23, Issue

Writing lay summaries: What medical writers need to know - Volume 27, Issue

Lay summaries are critical for building publictrust in clinical research and therefore forrecruiting patients. They are also an importantpart of efforts to improve data transparency.Due to new global regulations, lay summarieswill soon probably…

RCTs: Can the treatment work? Patient registries: Does the treatment work? - Volume 26, Issue

The first part of this article compares the main features of studies based on patient registry data with those of randomised clinical trials, providing a basis for better understanding the differences between the two. The second part details how to…

Regulatory Writing - Volume 21, Issue

The discussion section of a clinical study report The discussion section of a clinical study report (CSR) is often a source of doubt among medical writers. The advice is usually to keep the discussion section as short as possible and not go…

Lay summaries for Phase 1 trials in healthy volunteers - Volume 29, Issue

Lay summaries of Phase I trials in healthy volunteers pose a challenge because their endpoints are complex, the targeted indication may not be known when they are conducted, their results are often reported years after the trial ended, and the…

Creation of a patient-centric patient lay summary in the local language - Volume 26, Issue

Prior to this project, no patient lay summary (PLS) had ever been developed locally in Japan. In order to create a PLS that is more tailored to local patients, we attempted to develop one in and for Japanese. Such PLS was drafted based on the…

Regulatory Writing: Authorship issues in regulatory documents - Volume 25, Issue

When medical writers discuss authors and authorship – the theme of this issue of medical writing – they are usually referring to documents in the public domain such as journal articles or maybe congress abstracts. The primary purpose of such…

Biostatistics, data management, and medical writing: A multidisciplinary approach to the development of the CTD integrated summaries - Volume 29, Issue

Analyses of integrated databases of efficacy and safety are a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requirement. They are very useful in evaluating the safety and efficacy data gathered in multiple clinical studies. However, their utility is dependent…

The horror and the pity: Obesity and diabetes - Volume 21, Issue

Something less beguiling for a horror-story addict than the emergence of obesity would be hard to imagine. Start by reading the 27 August 2011 issue of the Lancet. One article predicts that the obesity rate in the UK will make the tremendous leap fro…